| The great unsettled question of late nineteenth-century physics was the status of the mechanical world-view. For more than two hundred years--from Descartes, Huygens and Newton in the seventeenth century to Helmholtz, Hertz and Boltzmann at the end of the nineteenth--physicists sought to find mechanical explanations for natural phenomena. Indeed, as the last century drew to a close, it was Hertz who restated the classical goal of physical theory in words that might have been used two centuries before: "All physicists agree," he wrote, "that the problem of physics consists in tracing the phenomena of nature back to the simple laws of mechanics." But by the time Hertz's words appeared in print in 1894, physicists did not all agree about the nature of mechanical explanation, nor did they all agree that a realization of the mechanical program for the explanation of nature was the goal towards which physicists must strive. There were many who doubted, and some who denied, that mechanics was the most fundamental science. Other candidates for this honor--thermodynamics and electromagnetic theory, in particular--were seriously considered, and comprehensive alternatives to the mechanical world-view were proposed and vigorously debated throughout the 1890s and early 1900s.; Energetics was one such alternative. Tracing its beginnings to the founders of the energy law, especially Robert Mayer, and to the phenomenological thermodynamics of Clausius, Thomson and Gibbs, it was an attempt by a number of late nineteenth-century physicists and chemists to unify all of natural science by means of the concept of energy and laws describing the behavior of energy in its various forms. The energeticists believed that scientists should abandon their efforts to understand the world in mechanical terms, and that they should give up atomism as well, in favor of a new world-view based solely on the transfers and transformations of energy.; The theories proposed by the energeticists, and the controversy to which they gave rise, form the main subject of this essay. Chapter I provides a general introduction to the philosophical background to the energetics debate. Chapter II characterizes the mechanical world-view, indicates the successes of the mechanical program of research, and describes the problems confronted by that program at the end of the last century. Owing to those problems, it argues, many scientists had by then begun to consider alternatives to mechanism. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI... |
